Report that Finland tops global school table

BBC is just reporting that Finland tops global school table.

The article says that Finland's CLAIM to have the best school system was reinforced by the latest international comparisons. The results are from just 40 countries and it is a reflection of maths and reading abilities and it consists of an appraisal of 15 year olds.

Having been married to a Finn for the last 38 years, had four of our children pass through various stages of the Finnish school system (after their earlier education through the Indian system) and one through the Finnish University system (another two through the British University system), plus my own experience, having been personally educated through the Indian and British systems, and then working with University students, researchers and staff over a period of 7 years, I must strongly disagree with both the Finnish claim as well as the assessment of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Finnish reading skills are indeed excellent, but it is not because of the school system. It is part of the culture and the construction of the Finnish language, which is phonetic and develops way past any other language in the use of compound words. This helps everyone to increase their eye-grasp from the mere 5 to 10 letter words (normal to most other languages with the Roman script) to words as long as 20 and 30 characters or even more. Anyone familiar with commercially exploited speed reading systems will understand what I am talking about where it is possible to increase reading speed by over ten times with little loss in comprehension.

The maths education in Finland is highly laborious and it is quite queer as to the way that maths is taught - it does not give much to doing mental maths. It also leaves those poor in maths scarred for life. I am sure from watching my wife (a product of the early Finnish system of the 50's) to one each of my sons and daughters, products of the 80's, and now my grandson (00's), that the system is nowhere near any of the other systems that I am familiar with - English, Indian, American, French, German and even the closely related Swedish system.

However, the more realistic way of assessing the school system would be to assess the level of "education" provided. In that, the Finnish system is totally at the tail-end of the world table. My own experiences in handling Finnish students in a Finnish University, as well as in various other fora, tells me that my understanding of education just does not exist in Finland.

The Finnish kids are great at mouthing and parroting the words of the "teacher". They have little assessment skills, no debating skills, very little international skills, a large amount of "nationalism", and many more defects which expose a totally flawed schooling system.

It is many a time that I would throw in utter rubbish at my university students, and they would gobble it up as the gospel truth!! They have poor reasoning skills, and the lack of the ability to make an argument, makes them, in my humble opinion, very poor students.

Also, having edited countless articles for international conferences and scientific journals, masters and doctoral theses, over the last 20 years, I have found that the students were generally very poor in presenting their arguments. Exceptions, however, prove the rule. I had one student who finished his normal 5 year masters in less than three and completed his doctoral thesis in record time - but such examples are few and far between.

Finland is, however, the best country internationally in presenting an "image" and polishing that image that even they believe that it is the fact.

Sadly, my personal experience has been that there is a vast difference between the image created and what lies underneath - just as the claim that Finland is the least corrupt country.

My analysis and experience is that Finland is one of the the MOST CORRUPT COUNTRIES on this globe!! And, that corruption starts at the top of the political system, and runs through the judiciary and the entire legal system, the police, the bureaucrats, and right across the corporate system.

But that is another story, part of which was exposed in two of our books "Handbook for Survival in Finland" jointly authored with my wife and my own book "Seven Years Hard Labour in a Finnish Holiday Camp - A Finnish University". Both books were published a decade ago.